When it comes time to actually tackle the story, well – that’s where the problems come up again. You wonder around, talking with NPCs (some of which actually join your party so its definitely good to do so), and basically learn more about the limited lore behind it all. Given that, a lot of your time is going to be spent exploring – which is good, I always love a JRPG with a good sense of exploration. SaGa Frontier is a very free-form JRPG, with most of the character routes opening up the entire game world early on for exploration. Unfortunately though, I was disappointed again there. That said, this gives greater emphasis to the gameplay – which can actually be a good thing. So yeah, this is definitely not a JRPG to play for the story. In none of the routes did I ever really get a deeper look at the characters or really care for them at all. It’s mostly little bits of dialogue between the story events and a whole lot of grinding in-between. Red, another one of the characters you can select, probably has the most fleshed-out story of the bunch, but even his is extremely light for a game world of this size. Of course, that is the most extreme example. There was no main questline, no deeper story, just a little introduction, traveling to a couple cities to talk to an NPC, and then bam – final boss. Ten minutes later, I had managed to reach the final boss of that route by accident. One of the characters, Lute, quite literally has like one minute of introductory dialogue before just tossing you into the world. In fact – for most of them – they are hardly even there. Such a setup can still work, but this only makes the next problem more apparent – that being that the stories by themselves aren’t that great to begin with. Ultimately though, this setup is underutilized as there is basically no crossover between the different stories (well, aside from one). You get to see this world and explore its lore through the eyes of all these characters, each starting out in some different location and then expanding from there. Each character’s story plays out in the same world – and you will be visiting a lot of the same locations – but it’s effectively a bunch of mini-JRPGs rolled into one game. This starts before you even get into the game, as you have to select one from a bunch of different characters and that’s whose story you will be playing. Now I should start by saying that you cannot really go into this one expecting a traditional JRPG.